The Facts
Kim Hays, a citizen of both Switzerland and the United States, has written four books in the Polizei Bern series featuring Swiss homicide detectives Linder and Donatelli. Hays grew up in San Juan and Vancouver and studied at Harvard and UC Berkeley. Thirty-seven years ago, she moved to Bern, her Swiss husband’s hometown, where she worked as a cross-cultural coach for expats at multinational companies before becoming a mystery writer. The first Linder and Donatelli book, Pesticide (2022), was a finalist for the Crime Writers’ Association’s Debut Dagger Award and the Silver Falchion Award for Best Mystery. Pesticide was followed by Sons and Brothers (2023) and A Fondness for Truth (2024), which won a second-place Indie Reader Discovery Award for fiction and was a BookLife Editor’s Pick. The fourth in the series, Splintered Justice, came out in April 2025.
The Rest of the Story
When I was twenty-six, I met my husband, Peter, on a park bench in the south of France. A week after our wedding, we settled in his hometown of Bern in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, and I’ve lived here ever since. In fact, we’re still in the same neighborhood we moved to as newlyweds.
Between being born in the US and moving to Bern, I lived in twenty homes; six were in San Juan, Vancouver, and Stockholm. Being forced to learn new languages and adapt to different cultures from childhood on turned out to be very useful preparation for marrying a Swiss and moving to Switzerland. Peter and I have a son, Thomas, who’s thirty-two and lives in Zürich. While he was a child, I taught sociology and English and wrote magazine articles about Swiss traditions. Later I became a cross-cultural trainer, preparing employees of multinational firms and their spouses to live and work in a foreign country. It was a fascinating job, and I did it for fifteen years.
What I really wanted to do, though, was write a mystery. My mother, a librarian and dedicated reader of crime fiction, had guided me from Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie to Dorothy Sayers, Josephine Tey, and Michael Gilbert. After that, it was up to me to discover Dick Francis, Michael Connelly, Margaret Maron, Reginald Hill, and Donna Leon, moving on to Robert Galbraith, Tana French, Louise Penny, Adrian McKinty, Jane Harper, and many, many more,
The result was my first novel, Pesticide, a police procedural set in Bern. It features Giuliana Linder, a homicide detective in the Kantonspolizei Bern (Bern cantonal police), and Renzo Donatelli, a younger investigator who is in love with her. Pesticide is the first in a series of mysteries featuring not only Giuliana and Renzo but also the city and canton of Bern—places of dramatic beauty that are occasionally disturbingly dark and violent.
Don’t forget that the cows grazing picturesquely on our serene Alpine meadows are destroying the environment with the methane they produce.
I hope you’ll buy Pesticide and give it a try. If you like it, read the rest of the quartet: Sons and Brothers (2023), A Fondness for Truth (2024), and Splintered Justice (2025). My books are available in bookstores, on Amazon, and from Simon and Schuster: https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Kim-Hays/185276631
Kim Hays 